I have been using Kubernetes for 7 or 8 years now, and have nearly 100% stayed away from Helm.
Some Kustomize, a little bit of envsubst and we're good to go thank you very much.
Going on 10 years now for me, tried Helm a bit and yep - all I've really needed was a package.json deploy script with sed to bump the image version.
How do you handle cleanups and hooks? The best way to do helm, at least for me, seems to be about limiting its use to simple templating use cases; if you end up needing an if, you've probably done something terribly wrong.